- Project Proposal version 4

What do you want to make?



In the first year of Piet Zwart I have been looking at LGBTQI related topics. I mostly did so from a subjective perspective using photography, and by looking into queer cinema. In the presentation of the second term I made clear that I wanted to make a stronger statement with my work and be more political. 

I would like to continue with the three lines of thought that could be considered in my practice. Researching the photographic medium, but also the idea of 'seeing' in itself; developing a (gay) cinematic language of my own; and LGBTQI-related issues/identity. Ideally, as a graduation proposal, I would like to bring these entities together in several works that will be presented in an installation.

Video: The Love that Whirls

“That was my first film in color, in Kodachrome. I had met a remarkable-looking young man, named Ernest Lacy; he had an Irish mother and a Mexican father, so he was an interesting mixture. He had extraordinary eyes. I wanted to make a film with him. The idea for it came from Fraser’s The Golden Bough. The film was to present a ritual of sacrifice. Many different cultures have had ritual sacrifices, but I was thinking specifically of Aztec rituals. The film involved Lacy climbing to the top of a mountain and sacrificing himself to the sun. During the film he was nude. He had a beautiful body, and I was just using him as a nude figure, which has a long tradition in art, and has nothing to do with pornography.” 
“I filmed The Love that Whirls on Kodachrome, and at that time, to get 16mm Kodachrome developed, you had to send it to Rochester, New York. When I sent the film to Kodak, they confiscated it because of the nudity, and I never got it back. They had a flat rule about nudity; it didn’t matter whether it was a woman or a man or a child. No nudity. Parents couldn’t even make home movies of their children in the bathtub or playing in a sprinkler. Looking back, I probably could have gotten a lawyer and at least tried to convince them to send it back. But I didn’t do that. So I was shot down by Eastman Kodak. Their monopoly broke up in the sixties, and then there were independent labs that could develop Kodachrome and were willing to print nude imagery.“ (MacDonald, p. 33)

What:
During my research into gay cinema I came across the fact that in the 1950’s Eastman Kodak censored 16mm film stock which contained nudity or sexual content by destroying the film (or taking it home). Owing to this fact one of Kenneth Angers films, The Love That Whirls (1949) got lost. 

Through an interview I found out that The Love That Whirls was based on a passage found in the book The Golden Bough: A study in Magic and religion (1890), which is a comparative study of mythology and religion. Kenneth Anger mentions that it deals with Aztec ritual sacrifice and was filmed in Mexico. (MacDonald)

In the chapter Killing the God in Mexico Frazer describes the customs of sacrificing the human representative of a god in Aztec society. The rituals have all been well described by the Spaniards who conquered Mexico in the sixteenth century. Anger probably got inspired by the example given of a ritual sacrifice during the festival called Toxcatl, where a young man was annually sacrificed in the character of Tezcatlipoca. For a whole year he would be worshipped and treated as that great deity itself. After the year he would be taken to the temple of the sun, the priests would carve open his chest and then take out his heart to offer it to the sun. The person selected was carefully chosen on the ground of his personal beauty. "He had to be of unblemished body, slim as a reed and straight as a pillar, neither too tall nor too short. If through high living he grew too fat, he was obliged to reduce himself by drinking salt water."(Frazer, p. 517a)

I would like to investigate this lost movie, by either making a project about it, or creating a remake. To get started I first need to delve into it a bit deeper.

How do you plan to make it:

I started by writing an e-mail to Kenneth Anger, asking if he could provide me with some more information: how he looks back at this film, where it was filmed in Mexico, and if he had a script or something similar available in his archive. I did not get an answer (yet).

Why:

What is your timetable:

Photographs:

Who can help you and how?

Relation to previous practice:

Photo:

In form and methodology but also in subject matter my graduation project will be very much connected to my previous practice. On the one hand I will continue the three strands of thinking I mentioned earlier. On the other hand it is also a continuation of my methodology I started using during my graduation year of my bachelors study.

Video:

Above you can find two video's of one of my first attempt at exploring the cinematic language. Through the use of slow-motion, colorful lights, black and white, sounds of outer-space, and lack of dialogues I try to create a mystical and uncanny atmosphere. One sees a young man, partly undressed looking and laughing in front of the camera, while a glass of water is being poured in slow-motion and in reverse. The pouring of the glass is partly based on a never-completed film by Henri-George Clouzot, L’enfer (1964). L’enfer told the story of a man who was overly jealous. The lead character imagined in terror that his wife, a sort of nymphomaniac portrayed by Romy Schneider, was cheating on him with men and women alike. In a particular scene, the female character is pouring water into a glass as part of a hallucination that the man experiences. Other influences came from Kenneth Anger’s films such as the use of light, and the overlapping of images as well as the homoerotic content.

The second video I made is a continuation of the first without narrative. In the short film you see a friend of mine, dressed up in his usual party attire. While I lay on his lap, staring into the camera, he shaves of my hair. Unlike, Untitled 2017, this video not filmed in a professional studio. For this film I transformed my friend’s own apartment with the help of redhead lights and colorgels.

The Love that Whirls will be a direct continuation of these experiments.

Relation to a larger context:

My work in relation to a larger context is mostly connected to my research in gay and queer cinema, history, and artists who deal with this in one way or another. Underneath you can find some abstracts and short describtions of texts and artists I am interested in. In my theses I will elaborate more this:

Books:
New Queer Cinema (2013) by B. Ruby Rich

B. Ruby Rich was the first person to discuss the New Queer Cinema movement and has been following and writing about it since its beginnning. The book looks at a broader historical context of this movement.

Texts:

Artists books:
Henrik Olesen’s (1967) artist book: Some Faggy Gestures (2008)

Through his work Olesen questions the power structures in our society and historiography from a homosexual perspective. An example is his artist book Some Faggy Gestures where he uses Warburgian methods to produce a homocentric genealogy of Western Art. 


References:

Frazer, J. (1922), The Golden Bough: A study in Magic and religion, Temple of the Earth publishing
Jenkinson, J. (1997), Face facts: A history of physiognomy from ancient Mesopotamia to the end of the 19th century. The Journal biocommunication 24

Stevenson, J. (1997) From the Bedroom to the Bijou, A secret History of American Gay Sex Cinema, Film Quarterly, Vol.51, University of California Press
Macdonald, S. (2006) A critical Cinema 5, interviews with independent filmmakers, University of California Press
Dercon, C, Sainsbury, H, & Tillmans, H. (2017), Wolfgang Tillmans 2017, Tate publishing (catalogue of the tate exhibition)

Le Feuvre, L. (2007), Searching for Doubt, Foam magazine #13 searching, winter 2007
Shimizu, M. (2005), Wolfgang Tillmans: The Art of Equivalence (from the book, Wolfgang Tillmans truth study center), Taschen
Tillmans, W. (2012), Neue Welt, Taschen 


http://www.aliciafrankovich.com/
http://www.eileenquinlan.com/
https://www.artsy.net/artist/mark-morrisroe
http://jeremyshaw.net/